Friday, February 22, 2013

pallaksch. pallaksch. : a poetry journal

In his 1846 account of a visit to Friedrich Hölderlin, Christoph Theodor
Schwab documents the poet’s use of a nonsense phrase, ‘pallaksch, pallaksch’,
in conversation with those seeking audience and answer from the once
pre-eminent, now mad poet of the tower. The idiom served the aphasic Hölderlin
as a mode of disengagement, a refusal to refuse or countenance the petitions of
a world at once admiring and pitying in its affects. For Celan this amphibology—this
‘Wahnsinnswort’ or ‘madness-word’, to borrow a description from his speech in
acceptance of the Büchner Prize—is the inceptive posture of one who would
mediate between logos and ethos, structure and praxis—the effulgent babble of a
prophetic countenance turned to face this time, always here and now. Hölderlin
had attempted such a pose, his eyes “spoken blind,” the poem states, “by their ‘a
riddle is the purely originated’”, and it left him in precisely the madness
that inaugurates Celan’s poetical stance—not a poetics of absence, as some
would have it, but rather of a presence in defiance, in retreat.

The idea for this
magazine came out of a series of discussions on the most general of poetical
concerns between myself and Elizabeth Robinson. During these exchanges, it
became increasingly clear that Elizabeth and I shared something in our
approaches to both the decipherment and composition of such work. The commonalities
of perspective did not run along usual lines; a general appreciation for
lyrical elements, perhaps—for the materiality of poetical discourse, as it were—but
not for any style of experiment or assemblage made manifest thereby. We appeared,
rather, to be focusing on a vector in the character of discourse, to use Spicer’s
term, a directionality variable in its aim, but particular in its attempts to
ground the externalities of reference in a question—the portent of the Seinsfrage,
in Heideggerian language, a ceaseless movement towards that’s no less proffered
as complete. We’ve conceived it as an annual affair, recognizing that some
inclination otherwise may come upon us in time. Both well-established and
relatively unknown poets are represented, each given enough space (perhaps
rope) to stake a claim, or reach an end, as the case may be. We’ve made a point
of selecting work of divergent style and approach, with hopes that in
collection there appears some sort of reason, if not precisely rhyme. And so caparisoned
with ambiguities too numerous to name, we point our fingers at the real, and…

The range here is particularly interesting, from
the more visually-attuned poems of Colleen Lookingbill and the stunning
stretches of Bridget Carson, to the semi-autobiographical poetics of Kevin
Killian and collage-hesitations of David Mutschlecner. Somehow, even with the
longer sections, each intrigues enough to make me want to see more. Literary
annuals don’t last as long as they should or could, and yet, New American Writinghas managed more
than three decades so far; any new literary venture is both brave and
foolhardy, and I look forward to seeing how this journal develops.

from my window

lumps of clouds and buildings through the pine branches as always

gray rough the news. eating through the seed in the feeder the finches